One common aspect of image rendering involves sampling a texture map to generate output pixels in a rendered scene. Certain texture map sampling techniques can be highly advantageous for rendering performance, but may produce undesirable visual artifacts. For example, rendering a simple base geometry (e.g., two triangles forming a rectangle) using alpha-tested geometry with an associated texture map of a tree can produce apparent geometric complexity of leaves and branches that would otherwise require many thousands of polygons and incur a performance penalty. Using alpha-tested geometry, branches and leaves are typically assigned an opaque alpha value and open spaces are typically assigned a fully transparent alpha value. Performance can be improved using alpha-tested geometry because significant scene detail (e.g., branches and leaves) need not be processed and rendered as separate geometric objects, and transparent fragments can be discarded without additional processing. While conventional alpha-tested geometry techniques offer significant performance advantages, undesirable visual artifacts such as flickering and disappearing geometry can occur. Thus, there is a need for addressing these issues and/or other issues associated with the prior art.